WOULD YOU CALL Lorrie Moore the Deborah Eisenberg of the Midwest? Or is Deborah Eisenberg the Lorrie Moore of the East Coast?
They are certainly distinguishable, but given what they have in common--realist tradition, contemporary settings, subtle sense of humor, gravitating to women characters from the educated classes, light dashes of lyricism in the prose--one quick way to tell their stories apart is that Moore's tend to have a midwestern setting, Eisenberg's a New York-and-environs one. If (unlikely, I know) one was given a Lydia Davis story and a Mary Gaitskill story, and had to say which was which, you would probably be right nine times out of ten. Or a Ben Marcus story and a George Saunders story. But with Moore and Eisenberg, you might be stroking your chin for a while, then just pick based on geographical clues.
This led me to imagine the possibility of a Beatles-Stones or Roth-Updike sort of debate among the fans. The Beatles and the Stones were about the same age, had a lot of the same influences, were playing the same-sort of music, and were contending for the same glittering prizes, so from a sufficiently distant perspective--say, a middle-aged father in Turkey--they might have seemed impossible to tell apart. To their fans, however, the differences are salient and crucial.
So with Updike and Roth. About the same age, a lot of the same formative influences, working in the same tradition, a lot of the same aspirations. To me, the differences are salient and crucial, era-defining...to most of my students, two guys with fancy prose styles and toxic masculinity issues.
Moore and Eisenberg are not very close in age (Eisenberg is twelve years older), but their first books came out close together (Moore 1985, Eisenberg 1986), they are comparable in output (five collections for Eisenberg, four and three novels for Moore), and they tend to get the same kind of accolades from the same folks. I wouldn't say they are rivals; for all I know, they are good friends and esteem each otrher's work highly. And maybe women writers do not have that who's-number-one anxiety that I imagine Roth and Updike did. But I do wonder what a diehard Moorean would say to a diehard Eisenberger. Something like, "Yeah, I know, but if you really read 'Wings'..."
Monday, May 18, 2020
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Ish Klein, _Consolation and Mirth_
(ISH KLEIN HAS a brand new book out this month, by the way, which I am not going to write about here, having written a review of it for a more prestigious website. That review should be available before too long, I hope. Her new book is called The New Sun Time and is very good.)
Consolation and Mirth (2015) has a middle section of twenty-one old-fashioned riddle poems. What is a riddle poem? A reasonably well-known example is Emily Dickinson's "A Route of Evanescence," to which the answer is "hummingbird." "My Life had Stood--a Loaded Gun" I have seen described as a riddle poem no one has ever solved. Klein's riddles have solutions, but I have to admit they have all defeated me. so far. I plan to keep trying, though.
As in Moving Day, Klein uses couplets and terza rima fairly regularly in this collection, and the movement of the poems sometimes takes some swift, hard turns:
Consolation and Mirth (2015) has a middle section of twenty-one old-fashioned riddle poems. What is a riddle poem? A reasonably well-known example is Emily Dickinson's "A Route of Evanescence," to which the answer is "hummingbird." "My Life had Stood--a Loaded Gun" I have seen described as a riddle poem no one has ever solved. Klein's riddles have solutions, but I have to admit they have all defeated me. so far. I plan to keep trying, though.
As in Moving Day, Klein uses couplets and terza rima fairly regularly in this collection, and the movement of the poems sometimes takes some swift, hard turns:
You move to the right so that I must follow with my mind.
I turn and the drunk dog is asleep, the hand is nowhere visible.
I say the hand! The hand! My bucket becomes a red vinyl collar
You say you will wear it!Here as elsewhere, my favorite Klein poems are the longer ones that go on unpredictable odysseys, with lots of whoa-nelly hard turns, then end by zeroing in on the heart of the question. "Circular Runes" belongs in that category, as does "Eggheads and Rejects In and Around Science and Fiction Society," and especially "Like on the Subject of the Icebreaker," which ends thus--
There were others who are better at meeting the beings
the snow has not yet touched and touching them.
They are not so likely to get mixed up personally.
They were us once.
Sunday, May 10, 2020
James Baldwin, _The Devil Finds Work_
IN QUEER STREET, James McCourt passes along (in three places, I think) that Gore Vidal once observed to James Baldwin, "You don't get to be Martin Luther King and Bette Davis." Boy, does that sound like Vidal, or what? But--is he right? After all, Vidal himself made a go at being both Abraham Lincoln and Oscar Wilde. So why can't Baldwin be both MLK and she of the eyes?
The Devil Finds Work is particularly valuable because it's more in the key of Davis than that of King, and gives us a Baldwin we only occasionally glimpse in the more famous essays. "Whites may or may not deserve to be hated, depending on how one manipulates one's reserves of energy, and what one makes of history: in any case, the reassurance is false, the need ignoble, and the question, in this context, absolutely irrelevant." The accents of Margo Channing resound in "depending on how one's manipulates one's reserves of energy," and that's a nicely stuck Margo landing as well. Or try this: "Neither does it suggest that the distinction between Big Business and Organized Crime is like the old ad, which asks, Which Twin has the Toni?"
The first chapter of The Devil Finds Work is highly autobiographical, but dealing mainly with Baldwin's first acquaintance with the theater, both in its stage and its screen versions. The other two chapters are largely discussions of particular films and particular performances.
These discussions are definitely about race in the United States as well--Baldwin is writing about Birth of a Nation, The Defiant Ones, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Lady Sings the Blues, and other films in which Hollywood does its limited best to deal with race--but even so, a reader gets the feeling that Baldwin is happy just to dish about movies.
One sentence begins, "My buddy, Ava Gardner, once asked me...". His discussions of The Exorcist and Lawrence of Arabia do circle back around, and tellingly, to the subject of race, but he seems obviously to be enjoying himself in ways he rarely allowed himself to do:
The Devil Finds Work is particularly valuable because it's more in the key of Davis than that of King, and gives us a Baldwin we only occasionally glimpse in the more famous essays. "Whites may or may not deserve to be hated, depending on how one manipulates one's reserves of energy, and what one makes of history: in any case, the reassurance is false, the need ignoble, and the question, in this context, absolutely irrelevant." The accents of Margo Channing resound in "depending on how one's manipulates one's reserves of energy," and that's a nicely stuck Margo landing as well. Or try this: "Neither does it suggest that the distinction between Big Business and Organized Crime is like the old ad, which asks, Which Twin has the Toni?"
The first chapter of The Devil Finds Work is highly autobiographical, but dealing mainly with Baldwin's first acquaintance with the theater, both in its stage and its screen versions. The other two chapters are largely discussions of particular films and particular performances.
These discussions are definitely about race in the United States as well--Baldwin is writing about Birth of a Nation, The Defiant Ones, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Lady Sings the Blues, and other films in which Hollywood does its limited best to deal with race--but even so, a reader gets the feeling that Baldwin is happy just to dish about movies.
One sentence begins, "My buddy, Ava Gardner, once asked me...". His discussions of The Exorcist and Lawrence of Arabia do circle back around, and tellingly, to the subject of race, but he seems obviously to be enjoying himself in ways he rarely allowed himself to do:
Lawrence of Arabia, stemming, both dimly and helplessly, from T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is a kind of muted and updated, excruciatingly astute version of Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din. The word "muted" does not refer to the musical score, which must be the loudest in the history of cinema, and which is absolutely indispensable to the intention of the film.Bette on, James.
Saturday, May 9, 2020
Ish Klein, _Moving Day_
IF YOU ARE one of those folks who think that all contemporary American poetry sounds alike, (1) I believe you are mistaken and (2) you should read Ish Klein.
This collection from 2011 would be a place to start. Sometimes Klein is surreal, sometimes plainspoken, and the surprising thing is she often is both at once. She comes out with quite atartling statements that, even as they startle, seem to be matter-of-fact documentary reports. "Standard penises are made of a certain kind of plant," she notes in "No Promissory Notes," a poem that seems like an encyclopedia article from a world similar to but not identical to our own.
The poems often recount first-person tales, and these too seem to take place in a world with a physics a little different from those of the familiar world, in which one mighty be, for instance, an ice cube:
The marvelous thing, though, is that Klein's voice inspires perefct confidence. That is, even though I do not know how getting smaller could be a good sign, nor how one could melt an acquaintance in the shower, I am happy to accept both assertions simply on Klein's say-so. (That better lighting might increase the risk of shame I do understand, I have to say.)
Klein also has increased the total of good poems about Hamlet (a category in which I include Boris Pasternak's "Hamlet" and Erik Campbell's "Hamlet: The Action Figure Series." It ends with Ophelia, here called Orphée (the French name for Orpheus), which makes a certain amount of sense, as she may well be trying to restore someone from the land of the dead, much as Hamlet himself is. I tend to think catastrophe might have been averted had Hamlet been able to maintain his bond with Ophelia--Horatio is a good ally, but (obviously) not enough all by himself. Perhaps Hamlet and Ophelia could have rescued each other from obsession with the deaths of their fathers?
It's the Hamlet poem Stevie Smith never got around to writing.
This collection from 2011 would be a place to start. Sometimes Klein is surreal, sometimes plainspoken, and the surprising thing is she often is both at once. She comes out with quite atartling statements that, even as they startle, seem to be matter-of-fact documentary reports. "Standard penises are made of a certain kind of plant," she notes in "No Promissory Notes," a poem that seems like an encyclopedia article from a world similar to but not identical to our own.
The poems often recount first-person tales, and these too seem to take place in a world with a physics a little different from those of the familiar world, in which one mighty be, for instance, an ice cube:
The walls are thick! It's cold!
I am a trayed square among others like ice!
We are getting smaller; it's a good sign.
And it makes more space. My acquaintances and I
Work on melting each other. It can be done in the shower!
I am not ashamed, how possible with such poor lighting?
The marvelous thing, though, is that Klein's voice inspires perefct confidence. That is, even though I do not know how getting smaller could be a good sign, nor how one could melt an acquaintance in the shower, I am happy to accept both assertions simply on Klein's say-so. (That better lighting might increase the risk of shame I do understand, I have to say.)
Klein also has increased the total of good poems about Hamlet (a category in which I include Boris Pasternak's "Hamlet" and Erik Campbell's "Hamlet: The Action Figure Series." It ends with Ophelia, here called Orphée (the French name for Orpheus), which makes a certain amount of sense, as she may well be trying to restore someone from the land of the dead, much as Hamlet himself is. I tend to think catastrophe might have been averted had Hamlet been able to maintain his bond with Ophelia--Horatio is a good ally, but (obviously) not enough all by himself. Perhaps Hamlet and Ophelia could have rescued each other from obsession with the deaths of their fathers?
You remember poor Orphée?
A truly good audience.
Asleep in the reeds and mixed-up theatrically,
she thinks she is the river
and will likely enter its vaguely compelling commotion.
That is, unless
you, Mr. Hamlet, want to catch her
before she jumps in (she can't swim),
leaving you to th emachinations
and actually alone.
It's the Hamlet poem Stevie Smith never got around to writing.
Monday, May 4, 2020
Chris Ware, _Rusty Brown_
ONLY NOW NOTICED that my previous post was post #777. Not bad, hmm? I mean, that is a lot of posts.
Rusty Brown was published as a complete volume just last year, but it collects pieces that Ware has been publishing separately for quite a few years. That is, some of it (most of it?) predates Ware's last book, Buildimg Stories. I am hoping that puts in a different light Rusty Brown's being a good deal bleaker and comfortless than Building Stories. Not that Building Stories is a stroll in the park, God knows. But each of the featured characters in Rusty Brown is terribly, achingly alone--sometimes their own narcissism or immaturity is to blame, but not always--so I like having room to hope that Ware's outlook brightened somewhat after conceiving of this book.
The principal characters, in the order in which they are featured:
Rusty Brown, a third grader in a Catholic school in about, I think, 1974 or 1975. In a word, Rusty is bullied. On the day we spend with him, he has accidentally brought to school his favorite action figure--Supergirl--and he spends the day in a cold-sweat extended panic about what will happen to her, or him, if the toy's presence is discovered. A new kid in his class, Chalky White, makes friendly overtures, but Rusty barely notices. Yes, someone finds Supergirl. Yes, something bad happens.
Woody Brown, Rusty's father, teaches English at the high school level in the school Rusty attends. He seems to have burned out on teaching long ago, and burned out on his marriage even longer ago, and never to have cottoned to fatherhood at all. Most of his episode is retrospective, recalling a strange off-and-on affair he had with a co-worker as a new hire at a newspaper (he married on the rebound) and a science fiction story he wrote shortly after--his one burst of creativity.
Jordan, aka Jason, Lint is an older boy at the school, enrolled in one of Woody's classes and Rusty's chief tormentor. This episode covers a much longer span of time--about a page for each year of Lint's life--and he never seems to quite get over having a distant, cruel father, becoming something of a distant, cruel father himself and leaving behind a trail of emotional wreckage when he dies in his 70s.
Joanna Cole is Rusty's teacher--a dedicated and effective teacher, eventually she gets promoted to administration, somewhat to her chagrin. She plays banjo, looks after her aging mother, keeps her school going, but no one, not even her mother or sister, seems to notice what a loyal, conscientious, and good person she is. There is a little glimmer of redemption in the very last panel. I hope.
Ware's uncanny grasp of the structure of comic art--both its traditions and its possibilities for extension and renovation--astonishes. The man is a genius. But the sadness of Rusty Brown is deep. This was hard to read.
Rusty Brown was published as a complete volume just last year, but it collects pieces that Ware has been publishing separately for quite a few years. That is, some of it (most of it?) predates Ware's last book, Buildimg Stories. I am hoping that puts in a different light Rusty Brown's being a good deal bleaker and comfortless than Building Stories. Not that Building Stories is a stroll in the park, God knows. But each of the featured characters in Rusty Brown is terribly, achingly alone--sometimes their own narcissism or immaturity is to blame, but not always--so I like having room to hope that Ware's outlook brightened somewhat after conceiving of this book.
The principal characters, in the order in which they are featured:
Rusty Brown, a third grader in a Catholic school in about, I think, 1974 or 1975. In a word, Rusty is bullied. On the day we spend with him, he has accidentally brought to school his favorite action figure--Supergirl--and he spends the day in a cold-sweat extended panic about what will happen to her, or him, if the toy's presence is discovered. A new kid in his class, Chalky White, makes friendly overtures, but Rusty barely notices. Yes, someone finds Supergirl. Yes, something bad happens.
Woody Brown, Rusty's father, teaches English at the high school level in the school Rusty attends. He seems to have burned out on teaching long ago, and burned out on his marriage even longer ago, and never to have cottoned to fatherhood at all. Most of his episode is retrospective, recalling a strange off-and-on affair he had with a co-worker as a new hire at a newspaper (he married on the rebound) and a science fiction story he wrote shortly after--his one burst of creativity.
Jordan, aka Jason, Lint is an older boy at the school, enrolled in one of Woody's classes and Rusty's chief tormentor. This episode covers a much longer span of time--about a page for each year of Lint's life--and he never seems to quite get over having a distant, cruel father, becoming something of a distant, cruel father himself and leaving behind a trail of emotional wreckage when he dies in his 70s.
Joanna Cole is Rusty's teacher--a dedicated and effective teacher, eventually she gets promoted to administration, somewhat to her chagrin. She plays banjo, looks after her aging mother, keeps her school going, but no one, not even her mother or sister, seems to notice what a loyal, conscientious, and good person she is. There is a little glimmer of redemption in the very last panel. I hope.
Ware's uncanny grasp of the structure of comic art--both its traditions and its possibilities for extension and renovation--astonishes. The man is a genius. But the sadness of Rusty Brown is deep. This was hard to read.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Samuel Delany, _Times Square Red, Times Square Blue_
DELANY IS BEST known as a science fiction and fantasy writer, but he is also consistently brilliant and original as an essayist/critic. This book (now 20 years old) looks at the overhaul Times Square was undergoing in the 1990s, the sweeping away of an assortment of porn theaters, peep shows, and other marginal small businesses, the arrival of something more family- and tourist-friendly, blander, more corporate, more homogeneous--its Disney-fication, as it was sometimes called.
"Times Square Red," the first of the book's two essays, is in large part a memoir, as Delany was a frequent customer at the porn theaters over two or three decades. Not to watch the films (which he nonetheless has some brief and astute commentary on--see pp. 74-80), but for the sexual activity in the seats. Apparently, among the mainly-male audience, it was okay to open your pants and start masturbating, at which point some other gentleman might volunteer to complete the job for you, or fellate you. Money might change hands, or not, depending. Names might be exchanged, or not, depending. An audience member might only stop in briefly on his way home from work, or might spend the whole afternoon or evening there.
This sounds a little seedy, but Delany succeeds in making it seem almost utopian, in that ethnicity is not much of a consideration, nor class, nor education--anyone who can afford the modest price of admission may come in and take his or her chances. Scary things occasionally happen, there is a certain amount of odd behavior, but the milieu mainly operates smoothly on simple, shared rules. Delany has a wealth of anecdotes of this unusual but thriving community.
"Time Square Blue," the companion essay, is more academic, a kind of socioeconomic or sociopolitical analysis of the same scene described in the first essay. This essay is a bit heavier than its companion, but never dry.
Mainly, it aims to distinguish "contact"--the accidental, unplanned interactions that occur constantly in an urban environment, in grocery lines, restaurants, busses, and (yep) porn palaces--from "networking," an event (like a conference) designed to accelerate the growth of relationships among people with similar interests. Contact is a more random, less efficient way to form helpful relationships than networking is, but Delany makes a fascinating case that contact is actually just as productive of fruitful relationships--maybe even more productive, because it's a stew with more diverse ingredients, more happy surprises. It's also a good deal less frustrating that networking, possibly because networking means a lot of people competing for a small number of prizes, and plenty of people are just going to be disappointed.
The beauty of the old Times Square was that its heterogeneity made it a place rich in potential for contact. The new Times Square, by contrast, seems designed to prevent surprises, irregularities, accidents, unforeseen encounters. It's more like networking, and like networking, it disappoints; as an urban space, it fails.
"Times Square Blue" also includes a discussion of two perennial questions--"What makes us gay?" and "Why is there so much fear and hatred of homosexuality?" Delany's answers are, as one would expect, fresh and illuminating. I haven't room to recapitulate his arguments here, but to cut to the chase, one is made gay when one is interpellated (in the Althusserian sense) as gay, Delany argues, and fear of homophobia grows out of suspicion of pleasure, out of a fear that pleasure, rooted in desire, seeks and will achieve chaos if left to its own devices. The old Times Square may have looked like chaos, but it was actually a world with loose but functioning organization, serving a simple human need.
"Times Square Red," the first of the book's two essays, is in large part a memoir, as Delany was a frequent customer at the porn theaters over two or three decades. Not to watch the films (which he nonetheless has some brief and astute commentary on--see pp. 74-80), but for the sexual activity in the seats. Apparently, among the mainly-male audience, it was okay to open your pants and start masturbating, at which point some other gentleman might volunteer to complete the job for you, or fellate you. Money might change hands, or not, depending. Names might be exchanged, or not, depending. An audience member might only stop in briefly on his way home from work, or might spend the whole afternoon or evening there.
This sounds a little seedy, but Delany succeeds in making it seem almost utopian, in that ethnicity is not much of a consideration, nor class, nor education--anyone who can afford the modest price of admission may come in and take his or her chances. Scary things occasionally happen, there is a certain amount of odd behavior, but the milieu mainly operates smoothly on simple, shared rules. Delany has a wealth of anecdotes of this unusual but thriving community.
"Time Square Blue," the companion essay, is more academic, a kind of socioeconomic or sociopolitical analysis of the same scene described in the first essay. This essay is a bit heavier than its companion, but never dry.
Mainly, it aims to distinguish "contact"--the accidental, unplanned interactions that occur constantly in an urban environment, in grocery lines, restaurants, busses, and (yep) porn palaces--from "networking," an event (like a conference) designed to accelerate the growth of relationships among people with similar interests. Contact is a more random, less efficient way to form helpful relationships than networking is, but Delany makes a fascinating case that contact is actually just as productive of fruitful relationships--maybe even more productive, because it's a stew with more diverse ingredients, more happy surprises. It's also a good deal less frustrating that networking, possibly because networking means a lot of people competing for a small number of prizes, and plenty of people are just going to be disappointed.
The beauty of the old Times Square was that its heterogeneity made it a place rich in potential for contact. The new Times Square, by contrast, seems designed to prevent surprises, irregularities, accidents, unforeseen encounters. It's more like networking, and like networking, it disappoints; as an urban space, it fails.
"Times Square Blue" also includes a discussion of two perennial questions--"What makes us gay?" and "Why is there so much fear and hatred of homosexuality?" Delany's answers are, as one would expect, fresh and illuminating. I haven't room to recapitulate his arguments here, but to cut to the chase, one is made gay when one is interpellated (in the Althusserian sense) as gay, Delany argues, and fear of homophobia grows out of suspicion of pleasure, out of a fear that pleasure, rooted in desire, seeks and will achieve chaos if left to its own devices. The old Times Square may have looked like chaos, but it was actually a world with loose but functioning organization, serving a simple human need.
Friday, May 1, 2020
René Girard, _A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare_
IN WYNDHAM LEWIS'S The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare, he observes, "Troilus and Cressida is the one play that no shakespearian [sic] critic ever approaches without a baffled 'hem!' and a sense of treading on dangerous ground. It is an eccentric integrant of the series that will not fit in with the smooth picture he [i.e., the critic] has been able to compose elsewhere...".
Lewis has a point here--but he did not foresee Girard. In Girard's analysis of Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida is the central exhibit, the subject of six of A Theater of Envy's thirty-eight chapters. (Midsummer Night's Dream gets eight, Julius Caesar and The Winter's Tale five each, Hamlet one, Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra zero; Richard III gets half a chapter, the other histories zip.)
Girard (1923-2015) might turn out, years hence, to be a figure on the scale of Freud or Marx--a thinker with a big idea that explains nearly everything. For Marx, the big idea is class conflict, the driver of history. For Freud, the big idea is the unconscious, unacknowledged determiner of what we do and how we feel. For Girard, the big idea is mimesis--that we are basically imitative creatures. We decide what we want mainly by seeing what other people want, and then adopting their desires as our own. (At the very least, Girard completely explains middle school social life.) Since we all end up wanting the same things, rivalry ensues, competition, conflict, eventually violence. If we are lucky, the violence evolves into a myth of "a founding murder," the sacrifice of an innocent that we can ritually re-enact to remind ourselves not to let things get so far out of hand.
Girard finds pieces of this scenario in a variety of Shakespearean plays. The sexual version forms the core of the plot in Midsummer Night' s Dream, Lysander and Demetrius seemingly most interested in whatever the woman the other is interested in. Julius Caesar is the political version, Rome's most powerful men all converging on the same prize, Brutus trying to engineer a "sacrifice" that will create peace, but the murder stubbornly remaining a murder, with civil war ensuing.
Troilus and Cressida is the whole enchilada. Pandarus goads Troilus into obsession with Cressida by describing how avidly others are obsessed with her, then goads Cressida into obsession Troilus by describing how avidly others are obsessed with him. The background for this erotic mimesis is another political mimesis, as Greeks and Trojans kill each other out of desire to secure what the other side desires--Helen. But as in Julius Caesar, the sacrifice--the brutal, cowardly slaying of Hector-- fails.
In The Winter's Tale, though, Leontes' jealousy (his fear and rage that his friend Polixenes wants what he, Leontes, wants) leads to two deaths, but ritual remembrance has the astonishing effect of restoration and healing.
A really worthwhile book--new angles on Shakespeare are relatively rare, and I learned a lot.
Rather like Freud (via Ernest Jones) on Shakespeare, though, Girard sometimes seems to congratulate Shakespeare on having intuited what he, Girard, actually described and named:
Lewis has a point here--but he did not foresee Girard. In Girard's analysis of Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida is the central exhibit, the subject of six of A Theater of Envy's thirty-eight chapters. (Midsummer Night's Dream gets eight, Julius Caesar and The Winter's Tale five each, Hamlet one, Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra zero; Richard III gets half a chapter, the other histories zip.)
Girard (1923-2015) might turn out, years hence, to be a figure on the scale of Freud or Marx--a thinker with a big idea that explains nearly everything. For Marx, the big idea is class conflict, the driver of history. For Freud, the big idea is the unconscious, unacknowledged determiner of what we do and how we feel. For Girard, the big idea is mimesis--that we are basically imitative creatures. We decide what we want mainly by seeing what other people want, and then adopting their desires as our own. (At the very least, Girard completely explains middle school social life.) Since we all end up wanting the same things, rivalry ensues, competition, conflict, eventually violence. If we are lucky, the violence evolves into a myth of "a founding murder," the sacrifice of an innocent that we can ritually re-enact to remind ourselves not to let things get so far out of hand.
Girard finds pieces of this scenario in a variety of Shakespearean plays. The sexual version forms the core of the plot in Midsummer Night' s Dream, Lysander and Demetrius seemingly most interested in whatever the woman the other is interested in. Julius Caesar is the political version, Rome's most powerful men all converging on the same prize, Brutus trying to engineer a "sacrifice" that will create peace, but the murder stubbornly remaining a murder, with civil war ensuing.
Troilus and Cressida is the whole enchilada. Pandarus goads Troilus into obsession with Cressida by describing how avidly others are obsessed with her, then goads Cressida into obsession Troilus by describing how avidly others are obsessed with him. The background for this erotic mimesis is another political mimesis, as Greeks and Trojans kill each other out of desire to secure what the other side desires--Helen. But as in Julius Caesar, the sacrifice--the brutal, cowardly slaying of Hector-- fails.
In The Winter's Tale, though, Leontes' jealousy (his fear and rage that his friend Polixenes wants what he, Leontes, wants) leads to two deaths, but ritual remembrance has the astonishing effect of restoration and healing.
A really worthwhile book--new angles on Shakespeare are relatively rare, and I learned a lot.
Rather like Freud (via Ernest Jones) on Shakespeare, though, Girard sometimes seems to congratulate Shakespeare on having intuited what he, Girard, actually described and named:
"With his awareness of the victimage mechanism and its religious consequences, [Shakespeare] reached an anthropological vision that has remained undeciphered to this day but is finally becoming intelligible, thanks to the same mimetic theory that enabled us to unravel the significance of the comedies" (209).His original audiences, who knew not Girard, could not really have been able to understand how far ahead of his time Shakespeare was:
"For which spectators were such marvels conceived as we have in this play, still totally misunderstood and disdained after four centuries?" (236)But Girard, unlike Freud, seems sometimes to be onto himself, as in this remark about an earlier Shakespeare explicator, Stephen Dedalus in the "Scylla and Charybdis"episode of Ulysses:
"...Egomen's reasoning: 'Since Shakespeare knows everything about mimetic desire, and so do I, and since no one else does, except for a few towering asters, I must be a towering master myself'." (264-65)
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